


The Shadow

by vailkagami



Category: Thief (Video Games)
Genre: Gen, crossing the old series with the new game, non-linear, sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-27
Updated: 2014-05-27
Packaged: 2018-01-26 19:59:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,083
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1700669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vailkagami/pseuds/vailkagami
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is opportunity, but there are moving shadows, too. Everything that was before might have been a dream but everything that is now is wrong and something is always missing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Shadow

Sometimes it is like this.

 

-

 

The City is like it has always been but only for a moment. Tall buildings and dirt; rotting waste and walking waste and far too many people, and things are never quite right here. Not the right angle on that tower. Not the right quarter for that bar. The metal sounds different when he makes it sing for him.

It sings for him. And so does everyone else, if he wants them to.

 

-

 

The first days are a blur in his memory, just sticky organic substance and the taste of iron and the knowledge that everything is wrong.

 

-

 

The City does not know him.

 

-

 

Opportunity lies in every angle and pillar and gear. The City does not know him but it will. Second chances. The Trickster is long gone, and so is the Builder, and they took all the old gods with them and the people build new streets on their splintering bones and lit their streetlamps and forgot how to be afraid.

He stares long and hard at the first coins he gets into his hands, bearing the image of a man he does not know and thinks about leaving them on the Watchman’s Grave as a mockery. He melts them down instead and creates something beautiful and perfect.

 

-

 

Does he need a second chance? Was he here before? There are no gods residing in his place and there never were and everything is an old dream.

 

-

 

It takes an impressively long time for them to think he must be insane. His plans have been set in motion, by then, and other things can wait. He does not care. He will come back, he tells them as they drag him away and people are mourning his passing, they are _mourning_ him because they love what he could give them and, and he wants to laugh because he will see them all dead and they are all ghosts and little pieces in a broken machine that he needs to fix and he will be their messiah who turns them all to dust.

He does not tell them that. He just leaves, into the dark where the screams of lesser people echo. They do not deserve that knowledge. They are not _his_ people. The men dragging him are not _his_ enemy. They are not worthy.

He hates them all, all of them, all of them. They are not right. They are not _his_.

 

-

 

This is not his City.

 

-

 

His first thought, first _idea_ in his first clear memory of this broken place is that of new beginnings. He will start over. He will sit on a golden throne in the centre of Utopia and no one will even try to stop him.

 

-

 

There is no one to stop him here.

 

-

 

He gains money, from people who love him and through the work he does that brings them awe as if they could even begin to appreciate it. He gets a house. He has all plants on his grounds removed before he even sets up his tools.

 

-

 

They keep him in the bright, claustrophobic rooms on the top floor for a week and then take him down to the basement where bars are everywhere and the walls seem so thin sometimes, like he could see through them if he got the angle right, but there’s always darkness on the other side. Sometimes he thinks he sees a shadow moving in the dark of this room or another but it is always gone when he looks again. It is never there.

 

-

 

People are still easy. The crazy man is like a gift from a Builder who no longer builds. A final proof of His love. Validation, naturally. The man is crazy but skilled. Driven but delusional. He will do everything if he hears what he wants to hear. The man wants to betray him, as humans do, but he will not live long enough to try. He is a valuable asset of the moment, and easily steered into one direction, never to look left or right again once an idea has been planed in his sticky organic brain. His children may yet live.

 

-

 

He is not insane but mad. The walls and bars do not bother him. The City does.

 

-

 

Sometimes he thinks he sees a shadow on the rooftops but it is always gone when he looks closer.

 

-

 

There might be a way back, he sometimes muses. He knows it exists. He doesn’t look for it because there is no reason to go back when he seems to remember that there is death on the other side. His death. His past act of dying. This is not an afterlife.

 

-

 

The walls are shifting like clockwork in the places that have not moved. The asylum. The watchmaker’s shop. Somewhere behind walls and time, Shalebridge is still screaming.

 

-

 

The bars are there and they are not but they hold him back all the same. He does not try to leave. His prison is just another workshop. He can wait, and observe, and listen to the whispers of change and static around him. In the dark. In the walls. He feels like he is not always in the same place and the same time. The bars might go away but when they do he might be where he is dead. He will rather wait. His time will come and he will walk on solid ground.

 

-

 

He is catered to by ghosts.

 

-

 

Buildings upon buildings upon buildings, all stacked into one another and he can see his reflection in every window.

 

-

 

He loses himself for a while, in the cool twilight and the echoes. He creeps through the halls and strides through the halls and always returns to his cell, his throne room where he tinkers and creates with the limited means he has, with the things he steals and smuggles into his realm and the things he makes others give him when they are so eager to please him; where he creates, for no reason at all, a mechanical eye, his finest work so far, not just here but perhaps ever; a construct so advanced, so ingenious that it can actually _see_ , and throws it into the darkness outside his cell in a fit of rage when he realises it serves no purpose.

 

-

 

The events that brought him here never happened. Nothing before ever happened. Sometimes his memory gets blurred.

 

-

 

Sometimes he thinks he sees a shadow on the rooftops.

 

 

27 May 2014

 

**Author's Note:**

> Written for my [genprompt-bingo card](http://vail-kagami.dreamwidth.org/13399.html). Prompt: _Genius_


End file.
